How different this Thanksgiving Day holiday is than those we’ve celebrated in the past. We’re warned by the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) not to travel and celebrate with those in our immediate household, the same ones we’ve been cooped up with for months. Yay. At least it will eliminate the potential of fights between shirttail relations.
Some years back, I worked with a woman whose family no longer celebrated Thanksgiving with a family get-together. It was always a tense situation for one reason or another. The end came when two of her uncles got into a fist fight and knocked over the tables where the turkey and all the other dinner edibles were laid out. They both ended up rolling around on the floor in the sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. No one felt much like eating after that, except for the dog.
In the midst of his whining, pouting, and general petulance over the election, Donald Trump released his grip on his sand wedge long enough to pardon two turkeys, soon to be three when he includes himself. Pardoning himself may take care of his presidential crimes, but lawyers and prosecutors are lined up, counting the days until he’s booted out of the White House so they can slap him with criminal charges and subpoenas. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to jail you go. Meanwhile, during the nutty Rudy Clown Show, Giuliani did his best to imitate fellow Republican, Joe McCarthy from the 1950s, by holding up a batch of papers claiming they contained evidence of election fraud. Sixty-plus years ago McCarthy held up a batch of pages from the phone book and claimed they contained the names of known communists. The notable difference was that McCarthy didn’t have hair dye running down his face.
It’s hard for me to believe that there are more than 70 million voters, including the My Pillow® guy, in the Trump cult who voted for him, in spite of his never calling out his buddy, Vladimir Putin, for putting a bounty on the heads of American troops among other things he just blew off. Visit the Holocaust Museum in Skokie to see and hear how Adolph Hitler and his boys came to power and how Trump and his minions mirror Adolph’s actions. Scary. In both cases, those who had the courage to tell the truth were punished, while those who lie and cheat were rewarded.
Speaking of rewards, my wife and I decided (she, mostly) to reward ourselves this pandemic Thanksgiving and buy a new treadmill. Our old one was on life support. We bought a new geezer model, one with a top speed of six miles-per-hour. We never went faster than three miles-per-hour on the old one, anyway, because for me, anything faster would be approaching Mach One. I read that constantly running (the machine, not me) at slow speeds (I don’t run at any speed) stresses the motor and wears it out. Consumer Reports rated our new model as having speeds appropriate for dead hamsters.
This machine has nice safety features, too. There are padded side rails to hang on to should a natural catastrophic event occur, possibly interrupting your workout. A padded roll bar up front prevents users from getting crushed if one should get nutty doing donuts (the kind you do with your vehicle, not the kind you buy at Dunkin’®) and flip the thing over. What I like best is the dangling clip you attach to your person. If you can’t keep up and the dizzying pace of your workout causes you to pass out, or you just nod off, the clipped cord cuts the power, thereby preventing skid marks on your jogging suit, or eminent death.
So for me this year, there will be no fighting relatives, or relatives of any kind. Just some turkey kibble, football, and trying to remain upright while I take a leisurely, death-defying stroll on my Treadmill of Terror.
Happy COVID-free Thanksgiving!